Posts by kmceject

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Colossus the Forbin Project

Your early statement that Hal was the first introduction to the rogue AI concept misses Colossus The Forbin Project (which itself isn't the earliest - see the The Ultimate Computer episode of Star Trek TOS) but is one of the best in terms of potential for a beneficent AI that sees itself as the savior of humanity, but its version of humanity is stripped of privacy and other core values. Worth the time to watch! It inspired James Cameron's The Terminator according to some reports

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

Taken down a 'peg', er four legs

Long ago in the distant past I worked at a place with three people with the same first name. The third one, who was a bit of a petty dictator that nobody seemed to know what he did except make phone calls all day was known as D3 . He worked on a room that had four programmers, a telcom account manager, and no friends. For context, this was back in the 80s or 90s where all desks were typically buried up past the height of the monitors with piles of paper. The telcom guy had several shelves on the wall with his 'filing' that had one day failed and created an avalanche of paper some six meters across the office!

One fine Monday I came in and my office mates in the tech department suggested I go see D3's desk. With the wry smirks across that team I figured D3s desk had similarly slid. But lo, his desk was still covered deeply with its half meter layer of paper concealing his little used computer. Oddly though the pile was about 20 cm shorter than it had been on Friday, Well, the four metal legs on the corners of the desk were absent! He sat on the other side in his chair, that although it also was at the lowest setting still didn't allow his knees under the desk. He was on the phone so I went to check with one of my friends who explained that a argument had broken out the last week with one of the other programmers and although we had no proof, we expected it was his style. The lowering of the desk was masterfully done with nothing apparently out of place on it too. But then I noticed the piece-de-resistance where the seat height adjust rod was also missing!

Well D3 tried for a few weeks to get someone, anyone, to help him out restoring his desk (even found where the legs were hidden.) but to no avail. One day I was riding in the elevator with him and he begged me for help. I suggested that he should purchase a case of beer and leave it atop the desk. Later that week I heard that a case of beer had appeared on his desk. The following Monday the beer was gone, and the desk had been restored! I never asked who was responsible...

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

Pop Goes the Switch!

Many moons ago when I was young I worked at a shop that the wild west would have had a name for how crazy it was. Most programmers had their machines denuded of all outer panels because 'they got too hot' and the like. One day i popped in on a particularly egregious offender who was messing with his tertiary pc (Yes, he programmed on two at the same time and the third was there for experimentation. Apparently from his exasperation the machine had been working the day before and at this time in the afternoon he had been working on getting it up since 6am. He hadn't even touched his breakfast as I recall.

I watched over his shoulder as he plugged in yet another power supply (there was a tower of them next to him, along with power cords, power strips, his multimeter, and many tools. He once again let loose a stream of profanity as this one too failed to show life. It was about this point I reached over past him and pushed down the white plunger at the front of the case with a piece of loose, dirty scotch tape (cello tape I think you might know it as). With a whir and a beep the machine began to boot. He had taped over the switch when he pulled the cover off, but anyone who knows that type of tape knows it can have problems sticking to rough surfaces. The plunger was to the case interlock switch.

I came back the next day to see a big strip of duct tape on all similar switches in his office!

BTW- there was one PC he had in his office that had a pushbutton switch in the front of the case with a square, white plastic pushrod that led to the back where it pushed the button on the power supply. This piece was built as a gentle slope. One day at a hobby shop I noticed a package of HO scale skiers on sale so I grabbed them. I knew the PC was a loaner so when I snuck into his office I used scotch tape to adhere them to the slope! He loved it, but hated the tape so he crazy glued them in place instead. I used to wonder if anyone at the returns site ever noticed when they got it back...

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

Metaverse - Neuromancer

Funny until I read the description of the metaverse comic display I hadn't thought about the ramifications of the metaverse or its comparison with William Gibson's Matrix. Granted its been about three decades since I read that, but the concept is intriguingly similar. Will people who make a post that lowers their social media ranking be sent to a virtual prison for thirty days? As human interface devices mature will there be something like Meta's implementation of Black Ice for social media post correction?

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: One step too few

My first job had a PDP-8E as I recall. It wasn't in use but was in three racks in the back of the room. My boss told me he started the business in his house in Chicago with that machine in his kitchen and never paid a heating bill while it was running. He said when it broke down the DEC repair man would wash the boards in the sink with dishwashing liquid to get the grease off! Several years later when the place was absorbed by another company I checked out the machine which was being sold for gold scrap (hundreds of big, gold-plated pins!) I found that it was still powered up and there was definitely grease inside it. I kept one card and a fixed head disk platter that I used for years as a mirror.

UPS go BOOM!

A side business my firm ran for a while was as a disaster recovery contractor. If a site went down we provided a data center, and a certain number of terminal spaces for a few small firms. I guess it was lucrative on paper but then came the day when we got the call, one of our customers had a major disaster and needed our site. We dispatched a couple of people to assist the pickup of the hard drives - this was in the days of Supermini computers and they were using Argus drives, about 7U and 185lbs each!

At the site I worked with other staff to clear space and prep work. Soon the team returned pushing a pair of office chairs with these drives precariously balanced on them. The drives had been moved that way about ten blocks in lower Manhattan during a crowded summer day! Relatively quickly we had them mounted and wired to two computers that we had offloaded our clients (thank g_d for load balancers!)

As we worked I asked what catastrophe had occurred. "The UPS exploded!" I was told. They couldn't really provide much detail beyond that at the time but the next day I found out the batteries had literally exploded in the data center. This had created a hazmat situation and it took a week for the cleanup before they could be moved back.

In the meantime their users were shoehorned into every square inch we had on folding tables, including in the data center itself! Our site had expanded past the normal delineation of the 'computer room' and some of our servers were in one end of the communications office in a 'U' shape. Someone had put a folding table into the 'U' with two people on either side! This provided another minor disaster when one of them managed to lean on the power switch for the live data feed machine. Where I sat twenty feet away we had a speaker to a simple circuit that triggered if the asynch feed stopped for more than 20 seconds. I immediately checked and found the main system unresponsive and flipped to the backup, for an outage time of about 45 seconds. Still some 2000 customers were rather unhappy about that!

We found what switch had been flipped, a power switch on a disk drive of all things that was low enough that it hadn't been a problem before but the person sitting in the chair in front of it liked their chair all the way down and the seat lined up with the switch. For the day that user was relocated and the next day custom metal covers were installed. Fun Times!

They were with us a week and we never stopped sweating! I'm sure that experience was the reason why the next year the firm bought a building and built two data centers, one for us and one for the DR site!

The Generator needs to start???

We had a nice system on the roof that fed two different UPS (one for comms and the other for compute) when there was a massive outage on the east coast. The lights in my office and my computer of course went dead. I as practiced grabbed my flashlight and headed to the data center expecting the scattered generator powered lights to come back in a few seconds as the generator powered up. The first shock was the stairway was totally black! All the emergency light batteries had decided to crap out. Second the generator didn't seem to kick in. I reached the room at the same time as the building supervisor/maintenance chief. He and I checked and the UPS' were working.

We then ran to the basement to check the transfer switch and it was in the tripped position so we should have been up.

I went back to my office and grabbed a handful of lightsticks (the crack and glow things) while he headed to the roof six flights up. I ran to the fifth floor cracking and pitching the lightsticks into the corner on each landing. They didn't provide much light but enough to hopefully prevent falls. I heard the generator start as I reached the roof and we trooped back down again to verify all was well. Sure enough we were up and running with an elapsed time of about 7 minutes out of our 20 min on battery.

It turned out when he had gotten to the roof he had checked all the basics, fuel, battery for the starter, etc before manually starting the generator. Then he checked the wiring from the start switch, a high tech, self-installed telephone quad that had been run up from the basement. The 28 gauge copper wire had corroded and snapped where it was attached!

While we were explaining this to the CEO in the operations center in walked one of the developers with a handful of lightsticks. He explained he had found them in the stairs and wondered who owned them! We had him go put them back as the generator wasn't charging the emergency lights still.

Suffice it to say a better wire was run and the new quarterly procedure was to pull the mains from the street power to allow a full failover test.

(Another less fun day was the day we found out the UPS maintenance contract didn't have them checking the batteries or letting us know they were two years beyond recommended replacement!)

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: Not necessarily an Osborne

Back in the long forgotten 80s the world was quite different... I had a co-worker who was a bit of a hard rock enthusiast who normally showed up for work wearing a tattered army coat. He would go to customers with that attire and his battered toolkit which for no apparent reason contained a practice (dummy) hand grenade. This was a standard pineapple type with a blue spoon safety and a hole in the bottom so you could see it was empty. One day he was called to a customer in one of the newer buildings. He was taken to the communications area where he put his case down and to access one of the tools he removed the grenade and hung it by the spoon on the metal mesh cage wall. He then proceeded to work in a loud corner of the data center.

We first heard of this about an hour later when he returned to pack up and called us franticly to report "I can't find my grenade!" He was advised to find it at all costs by his supervisor and called us back about ten minutes later. First he found that he seemed to be alone on the floor. The other techs didn't seem to be around and their work tables were scattered with tools and coffee cups. The managers office door was open and empty. He frantically searched the floor until he found a hallway leading to the freight elevator. Almost to the elevator was one of the building security guards gingerly walking at a pace of about a step every five seconds cradling the grenade in his shaking hands.

Our tech considered pretending he knew nothing and slinking away for a second but his guilt got to him and he went up to the guy who screamed at him to get away. it took several minutes to convince the guard to tilt the grenade enough to look at the hole in the bottom to convince him it was indeed a dummy.

We didn't hear back from the tech for a couple of hours, apparently spent being yelled at by the floor manager. He was banned from returning to that company but released without a police call. When he got back he was told to leave the grenade at home from then on!

He said when he left the guard was still sitting on a chair shaking, being consoled by several people. Last time we discussed the incident the tech was still feeling guilty about the guard....

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Re: Etymology help?

Yup I remember those, and even have one of the drums! I disassembled a couple when we decommissioned them, They were exceptionally loud and fast. The Data General ones we used also had to be monitored to a degree to make sure the prints stacked right. One day I came in and the night operator had left early due to being sick. The paper was still flying vertically up to the ceiling and the printout had blown in the AC to the door of the datacenter as a large drift. I had to carefully push the door open so it didn't crumple or tear much and make my way to the printer to get it to stack again. I think it toon an hour and a half to restack that for the client!

How to keep a support contract: Make the user think they solved the problem

Re: I would have sacked Keith there and then

I think the contract was for the software being used on the terminal, hardware was paid for by the vendor, Keith's boss, and if he had to replace it they would have been another thousand dollars in the hole, besides he mentioned the user wanted to cancel the contract due to the problems and that would cost the company more money

I heard it as 8- Religion, 9- Politics

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

In NYC we split to wall power for some low risk items but we often had brownouts (during high load days they might drop as low as 95v on a 120v circuit!) that could trip a power supply. I think it was HP servers where this could ruin your day as you had constant alerts (the room could have twenty screaming alarms going) and they were a pain to reset. Beyond that some of them required a power cycle to clear the alarm lights on the panels, preventing you from knowing to check for other hardware faults...

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz? Detroit waits for my order, you'd better make amends

Re: Sometimes though....

My ring tone for my wife is from Collossus - The Forbin Project. When she calls you hear "This is the voice of World Control..."

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

This has happened with them before

Working at a Market Data Provider in the 80s and 90s we used all sorts of compression and limitations to keep our data feed fast, since we were sending ticker info out at the warp speed of 38.4kb async. (Inputs from the exchanges were a maximum of 19.2kb and we had about 15 different exchanges at the time as I recall.) The limit for a price dollar was 2 bytes but one bit was reserved so we had a price limit of $32768. Our stream used lots of bit masking where certain bits were used for various details. The encoding allowed us to take an 80 byte message from the exchange to put out the same data in about 14 bytes.)

One day the developers of that code started to panic when they realized that Berkshire Hathaway was reaching that limit. They had to spend days trying to figure how to change the code to allow for a different bit to be used for that flag bit and how to get that code out to the customers so they could read the new encoding. We didn't make it for all the customers because it required mailing a disk to them with the new software.